Empirical Gnollage: Installment 65 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment065.png]

A few hours of miserable trudging later, the pathetic excuse for a road began to rise slowly into a small hilly area, and the mud and weeds began to yield to shrubbery and pine trees. The plague of mosquitoes abated somewhat as they went on, but didn't go away entirely. Dusk was approaching when they reached what was left of an old tavern. It looked like it had been a very welcoming place, perhaps a decade ago. Now, the two-story structure's second floor had partially fallen in, leaving a gaping hole in the roof. The wooden walls were covered with vines, mostly hiding the expensive-looking glass-paned windows. The front door was closed, but clearly warped by the long, damp years. All that was left of the mostly-rotten wooden sign that had fallen down from where it had hung was a piece of a plank with the barely-readable word "The" and another piece with the similarly worn word "Tavern". The rest had been devoured by dampness and time.

A nearby single-story building with a wide sagging wooden door seemed to be stables. It looked like it might be in slightly better condition than what remained of The...Tavern. It was also covered in vines and the stable door appeared to have been hanging so long that the hinges were bent, but at least the roof seemed to be in one piece. The only other structure to be found there was a covered well, overgrown with moss. At least the rope coiled over a rusty hook beneath the well's cover and the wooden bucket tied to the end appeared to be intact, possibly treated with some waterproofing process.

"Do we just burn it all down with the vampire inside?" Al half-heartedly joked, almost too exhausted to swat at another mosquito that was buzzing him.

"We might find it too damp to burn properly," Bote suggested. "I am not a carpenter, but I suspect the building may hold itself up well enough for us to go inside and look if we want, so long as we do not do substantial violence to the structure. I have seen mineshafts with worse timbers."

"If there are fewer bloodsucking things inside than there are outside, I'm all for taking a look," Wikwocket suggested.

Al looked over their transportation. Haunch drooped with exhaustion, and Al's eyes lingered for a moment on the stiff, drained deer carcass Gruntle had dumped on top of the cart.

"Should we have someone stay out here to kill anything that might try to suck the vital fluids from our donkey?" he asked.

Even the normally-stoic Gruntle sagged from fatigue, but the potential to possibly kill something seemed to inspire some interest. He grunted once, and took a few tired steps to crouch down by Haunch. This gave Al some relief, since if there was a risk of anyone "doing violence" to the crumbling tavern and knocking it down on top of them, he assumed it'd have been the gnoll.

"We'll call out if we run into any danger," Al assured Gruntle, "but this place looks pretty empty. I hope it is, but maybe we can find something useful in there. At this point, I assume we're going to be spending the night either in there or in the former stables."

Feeling a little silly but not wanting to be rude - or unpleasantly surprised - if anyone still lurked in the ruins of the tavern, Al used his mace to knock on the warped wooden door. It pulled loose from the upper hinge when struck, then fell inward, breaking away from the lower hinge as well. The door fell into the main room of the abandoned tavern with a dull thud.

In the dim light of the setting sun, they could see that the tavern appeared to have been abandoned in an orderly fashion. Just inside to the right was the bar, with empty shelves and barrel-racks behind it. Round tables made from scavenged broken wagon-wheels or old barrels were scattered evenly in the main room, with a variety of chairs and stools around them still patiently waiting for someone to someday come back to sit down. A long-disused fireplace was built into one wall, and a door next to it appeared to read BATHS in fading letters. Wooden stairs leading up along the far wall were cluttered with debris from collapsed roofing somewhere above the second floor along with a worrying assortment of bones and dried corpses of birds, mice, and other small animals.

A few simple, unadorned chandeliers still hung from the ceiling with half-burned candles still in them. Not wanting to waste time to look for a ladder, Al commanded the candles to light themselves with a magic trick. They obeyed, though they sputtered and smoked a bit perhaps due to the age of the wax. The additional light only made the place look emptier, aside from a normal littering of spiderwebs and husks of long-dead insects. Wikwocket quickly made her way around behind the bar, but soon called out with obvious disappointment.

"Aw...it's all gone. No cashbox, no leftover bottles, nothing! Well, unless you count this one half-broken beer stein. Oh, no, wait, here's a trapdoor!"

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Rusty hinges creaked from behind the bar. "It's a cellar! There's one barrel left!" Wikwocket announced. Al moved closer to look over the bar as the sound of her small footsteps echoed, descending wooden stairs down into the dark. Then, the pop of a large cork being pulled from a barrel rang out. With the cork removed, a faint bluish-green glow illuminated the opening in the top of the barrel from inside. The light was just enough for Al to make out the shape of Wikwocket recoiling away from the barrel.

"Whoo! That stings! It's just vinegar!" she said. "Strong vinegar. Why is there one single barrel of glowing vinegar in the cellar here?"

"I don't know why it'd be glowing, but maybe it was some kind of wine that went bad before they packed up and left, so they didn't bother taking it with them," Al called down to her, "Might be worth something to an alchemist if we take it with us. I think maybe we should leave it there for now, though. We should probably check the rest of the place first."

The glow went away as Wikwocket popped the cork back into the lid of the barrel and returned up the stairs.

A door at the other end of the bar led to a kitchen area, also cleaned out except for a heavy iron cauldron still hanging on rusty chains over another fireplace. Al thought it odd that there were three separate small rooms attached to the kitchen. One looked like it had been a pantry of sorts, though there was nothing left on any of the shelves and there were no barrels of supplies. Another seemed to have been a storeroom for cooking utensils with racks, hooks, and drawers for whatever knives, forks, skewers, pots, pans, or other cooking devices might have once been there. The third room was also empty except for some shelving and a small writing desk, but the spacing of the shelves made Al think of a specialized library or study. One noteworthy thing had been left behind - a faded piece of parchment on the desk. Time and humidity had ruined much of it, but the still-legible remains of the neat, simple letters on it suggested that it had been a recipe for a meat stew. Wikwocket diligently went around stabbing everything to confirm - to her disappointment but Al's relief - that nothing they found was secretly a disguised monster.

The BATHS led to a short perpendicular hallway with four small rooms, each containing a wooden washtub and some pegs, presumably for hanging clothes up on. They each had small trapdoor-like sections in the middle of the floor which could be easily lifted out, and they all seemed to open into the same deep unpleasant-smelling trench below. Half-burnt candles waited here in candle-holders just inside of each bath-room next to the doors, just as they did in the chandeliers. One room's washtub had rotted and fallen apart, but the others were whole, not that anyone was likely to try bathing here no matter how much they needed it.

That left only the upstairs to investigate. Al put a hesitant foot down on the first step, which squished and fell apart when he tried to put his weight on it. Wikwocket quickly stabbed BiteySue into the step fearing or hoping that the unnatural motion meant that it had been made of disguised monster flesh rather than rotten wood, and yet again felt disappointed.

"There's no way we can get up and down those steps," Al reported,"It doesn't look like the weather getting in through the hole in the roof has been kind to them."

"You gigantic monsters might not be able to, but I can! I'll go check it out for you," Wikwocket boasted, and carefully, lightly, she started up the stairs. Some of the steps were so rotted from being below the leaking roof that they squished under even Wikwocket's light feet, but none of them broke entirely. She made it about halfway up when the light rustling sound came down from above. Wikwocket leapt and spun to land two steps higher as the light bundle of bright green ferns touched down on the step she'd been on. More soft sounds of something light falling through the air above her made her change her mind about going upstairs.

"Nope!" she yelled, drawing her dagger to defend herself as she dodged and weaved away from the newly-falling ferns and past the one on the steps below her. Twisting away and slashing at the reaching fronds with her dagger, she was able to get back down to the ground level with all of her blood still inside of her skin. She panted and glared angrily at the cluster of ferns now waiting on the steps. They had reached for her when she ran - the lowest one had even dragged itself one step down as if to chase after her. Now, they'd stopped and sat in place, fronds gently waving as if in a breeze. Gruntle leaned in from outside to make sure everyone was unhurt - or, Al reconsidered, probably just to make sure he wasn't missing out on any violence - then huffed and went back out to guard Haunch again.

"Well, aren't you coming after me?" Wikwocket demanded of the ferns after a while, but they didn't appear to hear her. One after another, they very slowly pulled themselves towards the nearest wall, and began to drag themselves up it. They inched towards what remained of the light of the setting sun coming through the broken roof upstairs.

"I know, I know," Al answered Wikwocket's accusing glare, "Fire. I'm working on it. Maybe we should go check the stable building before the sunlight's completely gone, then we can figure out what we're going to do for the night."